American actress Tallulah Bankhead was BOTD in 1902. Born in Huntsville, Alabama to a prominent political family, she was educated at a series of private schools in Washington D. C. At 15, she won a talent scout competition in Photo Play magazine and was cast in silent film Who Loved Him Best. Moving into the Algonquin Hotel in New York City, she became a central figure in the literary and artistic salon known as the Algonquin Round Table, developing a love of sex and cocaine. She made her stage debut in 1919 and moved to London in 1923, becoming a West End star. After a further unsuccessful stint in Hollywood, she returned to New York, taking Broadway by storm in plays including Jezebel, Dark Victory and The Little Foxes (all of which became successful film roles for Bette Davis). She enjoyed her biggest success in a Broadway revival of Noël Coward’s comedy Private Lives, which toured America for two years, making her a fortune. One of the first performers to acknowledge her gay fanbase, she employed a number of gay men as personal assistants (calling them her “caddies”) and consciously played up her camp persona on stage and screen. Her well-publicised sex life and drug use often eroded her career prospects, including losing the film of Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie. She made a brief, disastrous appearance in a 1956 revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, with Williams calling her Blanche DuBois “the worst I have ever seen”. Married briefly to actor John Emery in the late 1930s, she was remarkably open about her sexuality, describing herself variously as “ambidextrous” and “pure as the driven slush”. Her astonishing list of lovers included Gary Cooper, Rex Whistler, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Hattie McDaniel, Alla Nazimova, Mercedes de Acosta, Eva Le Gallienne, Barbara Stanwyck, Leslie Hutchinson, Katharine Cornell, Chips Channon, Patsy Kelly, Joe Carstairs and Billie Holiday. Increasingly dependent on drugs, she had a hysterectomy for non-treated gonorrhoea and suffered from emphysema in later life. She died in 1968, aged 66.